[indirectly, from the book Real Men Don't Eat
Quiche] A particular sub-variety of hacker: one possessed of a
flippant attitude toward complexity that is arrogant even when justified by
experience. The archetypal Real
Programmer likes to program on the bare
metal and is very good at same, remembers the binary opcodes
for every machine he has ever programmed, thinks that HLLs are sissy, and
uses a debugger to edit his code because full-screen editors are for wimps.
Real Programmers aren't satisfied with code that hasn't been tuned into a
state of tenseness just short of rupture. Real
Programmers never use comments or write documentation: “If it was
hard to write”, says the Real Programmer, “it should be hard
to understand.” Real Programmers can make machines do things that
were never in their spec sheets; in fact, they are seldom really happy
unless doing so. A Real Programmer's code can awe with its fiendish
brilliance, even as its crockishness appalls. Real Programmers live on
junk food and coffee, hang line-printer art on their walls, and terrify the
crap out of other programmers — because someday, somebody else might
have to try to understand their code in order to change it. Their
successors generally consider it a Good Thing that
there aren't many Real Programmers around any more. For a famous (and
somewhat more positive) portrait of a Real Programmer, see The Story of Mel' in Appendix A. The term
itself was popularized by a letter to the editor in the July 1983
Datamation titled Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal
by Ed Post, still circulating on Usenet and Internet in on-line
form.

Typing Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal into
a web search engine should turn up a copy.